Naturalism and Sociality Conference UNSW.pdf

2016

Full text: http://ojs.hegelbrasil.org/index.php/reh/article/view/166 ""Abstract: The recent tendency to detect naturalism in Hegel’s epistemology is more than just a phenomenon within contemporary Anglophone scholarship, insofar as it mirrors a questionable state of the art at the intersection between philosophy of science and philosophy of mind. According to the naturalist reading, Hegel maintains that the natural world is the only presupposition for satisfying the needs of self-consciousness. Such reading considers the essence of self-consciousness as naturally embodied in its essence, while downplaying the intersubjective dimension of reciprocal recognition needed for self-consciousness. Self-consciousness, as the thinking subject or the mind, is then lead to allegedly unavoidable delimitation of any knowledge-claims. On this reading, the natural is an insurmountable obstacle to the mind. Hegel, on his side, evidently offers an ongoing multifaceted dialogue with divergent streams of naturalism. Yet, the question arises: in which sense can we appropriately speak of Hegel’s naturalism? This paper presents the recent naturalistic approaches to Hegel, along with deliberations on Hegel’s possible response to them, namely his concept of the transsubjective thinking mind, the Geist."

2012

European Journal of Philosophy, 1999

Rediscovering Hegel: from Philosophy to social theory (Part-I) | by Rahim Volkov | Medium https://rahimvolkov.medium.com/re-discovering-hegel-from-philosophy-to-social-theory-part-i-219e9706b0ef 3/9 'The philosophy of rights'. His ideas and philosophy influenced various historians, philosophers, political theorists and jurists in the late 18th, 19th and 20th century. Among them was Famous German philosopher and Sociologist Karl Marx, who used Hegelian dialectics to develop his theory of dialectical and historical materialism. General Overview of Hegel's Famous works 1. The phenomenology of spirit: Hegel wrote this landmark work in the following domain: v Consciousness, self-consciousness, and Reason. v Spirit, religion, and absolute Knowledge 2. The Logic(the science of Logic): Hegel wrote this work in the following contexts: v Doctrine of being (Being, nothingness, and becoming) v Doctrine of Essence (Identity, difference, likeness, opposition, and contradiction)-Grounds, reasons and conditions. 3. The Doctrine of Notion: This include the following discursive concepts: v Universality, specificity, and individuality v The idea of knowledge v The absolute idea It also includes the following methodological domains: 1. The philosophy of subjective spirit: it refers to the Hegelian psychology. 2. The philosophy of objective spirit: It includes the Hegelian theory of law, morals, the state and history. It can be explained in the following discourse: 3. Personal Morality and its perplexities 4. Customary morality: It refers to the family and civil society. 6/8/2021 Rediscovering Hegel: from Philosophy to social theory (Part-I) | by Rahim Volkov | Medium https://rahimvolkov.medium.com/re-discovering-hegel-from-philosophy-to-social-theory-part-i-219e9706b0ef 4/9 5. Absolute spirit and retrospect: It includes Hegel's famous work such as aesthetics, philosophy of religion and history of philosophy.

published in: D. Stern (ed.), Essays on Hegel's Philosophy of Subjective Spirit, SUNY Press, Albany, New York, 2012, pp. 19-35, 2012

The local problem of the soul-body relation can be grasped only against the global background of the relation between Nature and Spirit. This relates to Hegel's naturalism: the idea that there is one single reality - living reality - and different levels of description of it. This implies, moreover, that it is possible to ascribe some form of naturality also to the social body of institutionalized ethical life. Hegel’s position can thus be characterised as a kind of aristotelian social naturalism: this, at bottom, is the combined meaning of the Hegelian theses that soul is the substance of Spirit, and habit its universal form.

Argumenta - Journal of Analytic Philosophy, 2019

In this paper I attempt to move the discussion of Hegel's naturalism past what I present as an impasse between the soft naturalist interpretation of Hegel's notion of Geist, in which Geist is continuous with nature, and the opposing claim that Geist is essentially normative and self-legislating. In order to do so I suggest we look to the question of value which underlies this dispute. While soft naturalists seek to make sense of value as arising from material nature, those who support the autonomy thesis propose that value is something inherent to human spiritual activity. Following McDowell's suggestion that value as neither inhering or supervening on nature, but is rather something we have been estranged from and hence something to be recovered, I suggested that we adopt the first person perspective as the starting point for an examination of the relation between nature and value. The first person perspective is to be understood as a position within value which imbues value to what it encounters and hence is a process of the reenchantment of nature. Seeing things from this perspective allows us to place the question of nature as external materiality (which both the soft naturalist and autonomy view seem to share) in its proper context as something which develops as the result of the self-unfolding activity of consciousness as it encounters nature as negativity. Understanding Geist in this way allows us to see value as inherent in nature.

An advance on recent revisionist thinking about Hegelian philosophy, this book interprets Hegel’s achievement as part of a revolutionary modernization of ancient philosophical thought initiated by Kant. In particular, Paul Redding argues that Hegel’s use of hermeneutics, an emerging way of thinking objectively about intentional human subjects, overcame the major obstacle encountered by Kant in his attempt to modernize philosophy. The result was the first genuinely modern, hermeneutic, and “nonmetaphysical” philosophy.

Ethics&Politics, 2019

In this contribution I defend the thesis that Hegel's notion of species (Gattung) is not merely the name given to a group of self-reproducing living beings but rather it is at the basis of the Hegelian naturalistic conceptions of self-conscious life, sociality and world history. I maintain that self-reflection and self-referring negativity are the main characteristics of the self-conscious life and they determine the features of both the individual self-consciousness and the entire human species by shaping social practices and world history as acts of actualized freedom. Therefore, the definition of human species goes far beyond the description of its natural features and depends on the fact that self-consciousness is able to determine itself by negating external powers or conditioning. The main argument of this contribution is that human species and its historical evolution can be defined by means of this self-referring negativity and by self-consciousness' capacity to place the external reality under an order of values and concept autonomously yielded.

Second Lecture. From the Phenomenology of Spirit to the Science of Logic 1.3 Remarks on the Phenomenology of Spirit 2. The Science of Logic 2.1 The beginning of the presuppositionless theory Third Lecture. Hegel's Logic I. Quality 2.2 Negation as the first step within the background logic 2.3 Remarks on the logic of quality Fourth Lecture. Hegel's Logic II. From finitude to essence 2.4 The finite, the infinite and being-for-itself. An overview 2.5 From being to essence Fifth Lecture. Hegel's Logic III. The concept and the progression to nature and spirit 2.6 About the logic of the concept 3. Outlook into the Realphilosophie (of nature and of spirit) 1 These talks were given as video lectures at

Despite its central importance in Hegel’s mature system, the section Subjective Spirit in his Encyclopaedia of Philosophical Sciences has attracted relatively little attention in the reception history of Hegel’s work. The most influential early readers of Hegel were mostly interested in other parts of Hegel’s system; and relatively soon after Hegel’s death more empirically oriented approaches to the topics of Subjective Spirit won the day, displacing the overly ‘speculative’, armchair philosophical approach that Hegel was seen as representing. Hegel’s direct disciples and moderate ‘centre Hegelians’ Johann Karl Friedrich Rosenkranz and Karl Ludwig Michelet did write extensive commentaries on Hegel’s Philosophy of Subjective Spirit, but their influence paled in comparison to the more politically astute and independently creative Hegelian ‘left’ who mostly focused on the Philosophy of Right or the Phenomenology of Spirit, as well as to the Hegelian ‘right’ who were mostly interested in Hegel’s views on religion and history. The long neglect of Subjective Spirit shows even today in the curious way in which the recent revival of Hegel as an epistemologist and a philosopher of mind, or of “mindedness”, has mostly ignored this text —even if systematically speaking Subjective Spirit is the part of Hegel’s system where issues of knowledge and of the mind are explicitly at stake. There is also a widely spread view according to which Hegel was engaged in his Jena-writings in a project of ‘detranscendentalizing’ the Kantian subject of knowledge and action problematically divided between the empirical and transcendental, or in other words of consistently conceptualizing it as a living individual human person embedded in the natural and social world, in language and in intersubjective interaction. According to this view, after Jena Hegel for whatever reason gave up this project and in his later work regressed into a dubious metaphysics of a ‘spirit’ which obfuscates the concrete lived reality of the human individual. Whatever the truth about Hegel’s metaphysics, this article aims to show that in the Philosophy of Subjective Spirit Hegel develops a thoroughly ‘detranscendentalized’ account of the human person as the “concrete” flesh and blood subject of knowledge and action, an account which deserves much more attention than it has so far received. In short, whereas the section ‘Anthropology—Soul’ of Subjective Spirit (see previous chapter) deals with the bodily aspects of the concrete subject, the section ‘Phenomenology of Spirit—Consciousness’ deals with the various dimensions of intentionality, or in other word of the subject’s theoretical and practical relation to objectivity, and finally the section ‘Psychology—Spirit’ deals with the intrasubjective or mental processes and activities at work in the various object-relations. Eventually all of the three chapters contribute to a holistic picture of the human person as the “concrete subject” of knowing and acting, yet reconstructing this picture requires a proper understanding of the structure of the text which at first sight, on a simple linear reading, appears rather fragmentary and thus confusing. This article focuses on the Psychology-section, and the thematically closely connected Phenomenology-section. I will first (1.) reconstructs the ‘parallel architectonics’ of the Phenomenology and Psychology, the understanding of which is essential for comprehending the substantial views Hegel puts forth in them. I will then (2.) draw on this reconstruction and introduce central elements of Hegel’s account of the human person as the concrete subject of knowledge and action as it unfolds in the text.